Tuesday, 17 March 2015

AMATEUR DRAMATICS

A shorter version of this piece appeared in the excellent Back Pass magazine.

The 1954 FA Amateur
Cup Final. Bishop Auckland v Crook Town. 5 ½ hours of football at three different
stadiums in front of an aggregate crowd of close to 200,000 – almost ten times the combined populations of
the two Durham towns. Those indeed were the days.

The struggle began at Wembley. Bishops started as favourites. They’d
played Crook twice in the Northern League that season, beating them 4-1 at home
and 3-1 away. The men from Kingsway were on a roll. They’d spent the
late-summer on a three week tour of Rhodesia, guests of the local FA, then returned
to the North-East and embarked on an incredible scoring spree that would see
them net over 200 goals that season. In the five games they’d played to get to
Wembley, Bishops had scored 26 times, including five in a semi-final win over
Briggs Sports that drew 54,000 fans to St James’ Park.

If Bishops’ skipper, Londoner Jack ‘The Galloping’ Major
appeared quietly confident perhaps that was unsurprising. Bishop Auckland were
the Real Madrid of amateur football and the 1950s were their glory years. They
took the Northern League title six times, appeared in five Wembley finals, won
the Northern League Cup three times and the Durham Challenge Cup (a competition
many locals felt was the toughest of all) twice.

Bishops’ best players were household names, not just in the
North-East, but across the whole of England. Wing-half Bob Hardisty (his given
name was Roderick – he’d been nicknamed ‘Bob’ by a midwife at the hospital and
it stuck) was considered by many the greatest amateur footballer of his
generation (one man who didn’t join the chorus of adulation was Bishops' 1938 Amateur Cup winner Kenny Twigg. He
considered Hardisty amateurish and lacking in positional sense).

A midfielder who liked to roam forward, Hardisty had captained
the Great Britain side that reached the semi-finals in the 1948 Olympics, forging a friendship with GB manager Matt Busby that would lead to him guesting for Manchester United in the wake of Munich. He
was tall, elegant, and prematurely bald due to an illness contracted in India
during World War Two. A PE instructor at a local Teacher Training College,
Hardisty, ‘was a man who unified the town, a story that folk lore is made of’.
Despite the veneration, Hardisty was no saint. He had a roving eye when it came
to women and a reputation as a reckless gambler. ‘There was bookies chasing him
all over Durham,’ a resident of the town once told me. And bookmakers in those
days – operating illegally off track – were not gentle when it came to debt
collection. ‘The club had to bail him out for fear they’d break his legs,’ my
informant said.

That the club would do such a thing hints at an underlying
truth of ‘amateur’ football: gate receipts were high and the players, valuable
assets. As a consequence many top amateurs earned better money than League
professionals. Future Liverpool star Geoff Strong left Stanley United for
Arsenal in 1958, later confessing that he had taken a pay cut to turn
pro. At Stanley he was earning £4 a week as an apprentice tool-fitter, a match fee
of £10 plus a bonus of £1 per goal (he averaged ten per month) – all cash in hand. Arsenal – constrained by the maximum wage –
could only offer £13 a week. And he was taxed on it.

Sometimes payment came through services in kind. ‘Every
Saturday your wife or mother could pick up the Sunday roast at a local butchers
and the bill went to the club,’ Kenny Twigg said, ‘And a couple of times a year
you could go and get a suit made, stuff like that. I never took cash, though I
could have if I’d needed it.’

One man who didn’t need it was the improbably glamorous Seamus
O’Connell. Born into a wealthy Cumbrian family, O’Connell was tailored by
Saville Row and transported by Jaguar. The inside-forward was a top class
striker (he’d equalled an NL record earlier in the season when he scored eight
times in a match against Penrith) and a world class womaniser who – according
to Northern League president Mike Amos – was so well endowed one society lady
who chanced upon him in the shower remarked, ‘Built like that you really ought
to trot’. O’Connell had just signed amateur terms with Chelsea. He’d help the
Pensioners win their first league title, hit 11 goals in 16 appearances and
then walk away saying, ‘I really don’t think football is any sort of job for a
man.’

Between the sticks for Bishops stood Wigan-born Harry
Sharratt - a goalkeeper so madcap he made John Burridge look like Alan Shearer.
Sharratt’s antics would fill several articles. One will suffice: he was booked
for building a snowman on his goal line.

Compared to Bishops swaggering Galacticos, Crook Town (or
‘The Crooks’ as the Pathe News commentator would insist on calling them)
appeared modest. The Black & Ambers’
star player was winger Jimmy McMillan. McMillan was quick and skilful and he’d
finish his career with a record four Amateur Cup winners medals, but he was no
glamour boy. He’d turned down the chance of playing for Newcastle United and
Chelsea, to train as a local government planning officer. Sensible, decent, honest.
The same might be said of the entire Crook squad. Coached by the young Joe
Harvey whose main focus was on physical fitness ('The only instructions I can ever recall Joe giving us,' McMillan once said, 'was 'If it's near the end and you're not losing, hit their corner flags.') and skippered by former Bishop Auckland centre-half Bobby Davison, the
side from Millfield was greater than the sum of its parts. To borrow a phrase
from Franz Beckenbauer: the star was the team.

Wembley was packed. Supporters from the two towns had
travelled down to London on twenty special trains and 250 coaches. To the roars
of this migrant Durham throng, it was the underdogs who kicked off. Barely five
minutes had gone by before the odds tilted in their favour. Bishops’
preparation for the game had already been disrupted, Scottish international
full-back Tommy Stewart going down with jaundice. Worse now followed. Half-back
Jimmy Nimmins slid into a tackle and didn’t get up. He’d broken his right leg.
With no substitutions allowed, Bishops were going to have to play the rest of
the game with ten men. Supporters shook their heads. Bishops had played three
finals at Wembley and lost them all. It looked like the hoodoo had struck
again.

With O’Connell dropping back to fill the gap in the
half-back line, rugged number nine Ray Oliver (a volunteer lifeboat man who’d
been decorated for gallantry) and inside-right Les Dixon were left to forage up
front. With twelve minutes gone it was Dixon who opened the scoring,
controlling a long free-kick with his first touch and then with his next
slashing the ball past the rangy Fred Jarrie in the Crook goal.

Crook rivalled Bishops for the power of their attack. They’d
won the Northern League the year before scoring an average four goals per game,
and hammered Hitchin 10-1 on the road to Wembley. They responded almost
immediately, Ronnie Thompson collecting the ball on the edge of the Bishops
box, advancing a couple of strides and planting a low shot into the left hand
corner of Sharratt’s goal.

With their one man advantage Crook might have expected to
take control, but they suffered their own injury crisis, Ken Williamson pulling
up with an ankle injury. He would spend the rest of the game limping up and
down the wing, occasionally hobbling off for treatment.

Bishops took advantage of the disruption. Railway worker Bob
Watson produced an inch perfect pass for Oliver on the edge of the box. The big
centre forward accelerated past a couple of opponents and blasted the ball into
the top corner from 18 yards.

The second half saw Crook in the ascendancy. Ten minutes of
more or less constant attacking were rewarded when Bill Jeffs, a summer signing
from Whitby, crossed for winger Eddie Appleby to hammer home the equaliser.

For the next 35 minutes play flowed from end to end without
anyone managing to add a goal. In extra-time Bishops came close to winning it,
Crook defenders twice clearing efforts off the line.

‘I have just
witnessed the finest two hours of entertainment I have ever seen,’ announced
Kenneth Wolstenholme on the BBC home service. Few amongst the 100,000 crowd at
Wembley would have disagreed.

The replay was held ten days later at St James Park,
Newcastle. It was Easter Monday, a 6pm kick off. The official attendance of
56,008 was the highest ever for an amateur match outside the capital.

Bishops made changes. Tommy Stewart returned and the
teenager Barry Wilkinson – a National Serviceman with the RAF - replaced the
unfortunate Nimmins. For Crook, Williamson had failed to shake off the ankle
problem. Ex-Bishops man John Coxon took his place.

Things began badly again for the team from Kingsway. Within
four minutes they were two nil down, both goals scored by the prolific Ken Harrison,
an Annfield Plain schoolmaster who had bagged a hat-trick in the semi-final win
over Walthamstow. Bishops refused to panic, and after a shaky first period they
emerged after the interval with renewed purpose. Gradually they took control of
the game, stringing passes together in the smooth flowing style that was their
trademark. After 69 minutes Ray Oliver pulled one back and in the 81st
he got a second. Extra-time brought no more goals. By the final whistle both
sides looked dead on their feet.

With league fixtures piling up, the third replay was hastily
arranged at Ayresome Park three days later. Conscious of time restraints, the
FA determined that on this occasion no extra period would be played and if
neither side was victorious inside the 90 minutes the trophy would be shared.
Despite the short notice and the difficulty of getting off work in time for the
6pm kick off 36,727 turned up on a windy Teesside night.

By now both teams had an unsurprising look of weariness
about them. The first two matches had been marked by excitement, goals and free
flowing football. This one turned into a trial of strength.

Midway through the first half Bishops had the ball in the
net, Oliver rising to head home Major’s corner. The jubilant players had danced
all the way back to the centre circle before they realised one-armed referee
Alf Bond had disallowed it, harshly ruling the centre forward had been ‘climbing’.
In the end one goal settled the match. It went to the Black and Ambers, Harrison
almost inevitably the scorer.

Joe Harvey’s team returned immediately to Crook aboard a
special train, skipper Davison waving the silver trophy from the window at the
supporters who lined up beside the tracks at pit villages along the way. When
they got home 15,000 people and a silver band greeted them despite the lateness
of the hour. There was to be no all-night partying for the Crook players,
however. They had work the next day, and in the evening there was a Northern
League fixture to play at West Auckland.

(Bobby Davison shows off the Cup to workmates at Marshall Richards Machine Co.)

2 comments:

Harry, a great article. I have vague recollections of watching the game on a fuzzy black and white TV at an Aunts who lived on Eastbourne Road almost opposite the police station. A black and white world.The photograph of the goal keeper and the 'casey' in the roof of the net is wonderful too.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.